Murdoched

A decade and a half ago I worked for a Murdoch-owned publisher, and my time there has left my quite astonished at a number of the opinions and facts that have come forth over the last week; I only want to address one of them here, however, not least because I feel comfortable I can do so without any breach of my professional ethics.

One of the more extraordinary spectacles for me has been watching Rupert Murdoch, one of his sons, and Rebekah Brooks deny that they had any knowledge of corrupt or illegal practises in various portions of the Murdoch empire, and theat payments, alleged to run to tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, had somehow slipped under the collective radar. Why so extraordinary? Well, in that past life, I had a number of responsibilities, and one of them was ensuring a fortnightly report ran correctly. That fortnightly report containted the financial details for the performance of the papers, and it was delivered to the then-owning interest of our parent company, in the form of “Uncle Rupert”; if the report didn’t appear promptly, there would be a query from Uncle Rupert himself. If the numbers looked odd, there would be a personal call for a please explain.

Was this the Sun? News of the World? No, it was Wellington Newspapers, then publishing a couple of daily newspapers which between them managed a circulation of less than 150,000 people in the second-biggest city in New Zealand. I don’t know if we were the tiniest part of the Murdoch empire, but we were certainly a bloody small bit of it. And yet if I fucked up that report, my GM would be explaining to Murdoch where his financial reporting was.

You can understand my incredulity that in less than a decade Rupert Murdoch has gone from a man who tracks financial irregularities with his smallest properties to a man who doesn’t notice that his reporters are expensing thousands of pounds for bribes; from a day-to-day life where sign-off might be required at the GM level for something as simple as a couple of new camera lenses to one where it would be routine to hire private investigators for story after story.

An extraordinary change indeed.